From Ars writer: Your expert opinions wanted on VMware vs. Hyper-V

I'm not talking a few hosts, I'm talking hundreds of hosts with as much RAM as is economically feasible. Right now, that's 256GB/blade, and in a few years, I expect it to be 512Gb, and in 4ish years, I would imagine we're talking 1TB/blade.

Get 200 of those systems, and you need 400 licenses under the old model, but around 2,000 licenses under the new.

As far as support goes Microsoft has nothing to do with enterprise, plain and simple.

MS has far, far better enterprise support than Oracle or VMware for that matter for much, much cheaper with premier.

I don't know anything about Oracle but from what I heard of VMware I doubt it's worse than Microsoft's pratically nonexistent default support... FWIW when I buy a bigger software package usually I can get proper support included - MS does not even sell such support through the channel, they leave it up to the OEM - it's like they are just a big 'taxing' operation by default, nothing else. All you get is a nearly useless 'social.microsoft.com' forum crap. It's better if you have MSDN, then at least you can get some useful engagements (hit or miss.)You want to get something fixed quickly? Cough up money per incident - to me it sounds like racketeering, reminds me to some scumb@g Asian or Eastern European companies and their shady business tactics.

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You really need to get past your biases.

I have no biases. Based on my ~15 years of designing, implementing and running Microsoft systems I have opinions and feelings, of course but they are based on empirical evidence (+ well-documented public information), not beliefs. That being said I believe the Server & Tools division is probably the best performing one (even with the fact that some idiot is forcing them to use this junk UI called Metro.)

(Off-topic -- FYI to sum up my opinion in short I'd say I have tremendous respect for all the developers at MS who work and produce new, interesting stuff under such a completely rotten-broken management this clueless bald vacuum cleaner sales guy at the helm built at Microsoft. Similarly I have an infinite amount of disgust toward his ever-pervasive, all-paralyzing, last century bureaucracy, the entire broken management Ballmer and his barely competent yet arrogant ilks (Sinofksy, Belfiore etc) represent. The upside is that with this upcoming UBER-flop (W8, that is) we have a good chance for the fat guy being pushed out, his ilks getting at least sidelined and introducing some fresh blood at the top. )

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It makes people dismiss you on the off chance that you have a point because you typically come off as a linux zealot here, and comments like that reinforce that image.

Which would be hilarious if true: I almost never frequent the linux forum - though it's more because I run something like 3-4 linux servers, only for intranet sites and services - and I'm always the very first one to jump on any new Microsoft solution, not to mention the fact that we are a Windows shop by nature (ie high-end 3D does not exist on Mac unless you are a very small firm, full of masochists.) I started out on Windows 3.1 and first and foremost I'm still a Windows guy - albeit I admit that after running W8 for a few days I did download the latest Fedora to see what are my options out there...

I'm not talking a few hosts, I'm talking hundreds of hosts with as much RAM as is economically feasible. Right now, that's 256GB/blade, and in a few years, I expect it to be 512Gb, and in 4ish years, I would imagine we're talking 1TB/blade.

Get 200 of those systems, and you need 400 licenses under the old model, but around 2,000 licenses under the new.

Start to see the issue?

and thats why VMware has ELA licensing as well. I meet with a lot of shops in the 200+ vSphere hosts 1000+ VM's and they all go the ELA route and pretty much have carte blanche to the VMware catalog.

One other thing, until its shipping and in the field and tested, HypeV-3 doesn't exist in my view. Lets see a significantly large enterprise level implementation (or a dozen for that matter). I don't forsee a large en-mass shift towards Hyper-V anywhere outside of that 20+ host environments unless there is some very compelling cost savings realized. If you have standardized on a platform that is proven and works you will be hard pressed to see management change over a marginal cost difference (as if we know what those differences are as of yet). MS may take advantage in the short term because of VMware's licensing changes, but I don't believe it will be nearly as deep as some expect.

Hyper-V VM's integrate with VSS, I'm not sure about what level of integration is offered for Linux based VM's as I haven't reached that point yet

VSS can only do crash-consistant snapshots for linux VMs. Like Hyper-V & Windows VSS, Veeam requires an agent on the VM to quiesce any databases or similar to have an application consistant snapshot/backup, since Linux doesn't have a VSS equivalent yet.

Hyper-V snapshots(which aredifferent from a VSS snapshot!) for the current released version, are rather useless due to the hopelessly broken merge requirements.

This is true, even Hyper-V itself tells you not to use dynamic disks etc.

FWIW with my EqualLogic I can do quiesced VSS snapshots since HIT v4.0 and they work very nicely so I'm not too worried about Hyper-V snapshots...

As you get into larger enterprise configs with dedicated dev/test and DR sites you can really start to utilize the extra VRAM entitlement from underutilized gear.

Wait, what? You can only consolidate licensing across a cluster. If your dev/test, DR, and production is all in the same cluster, you don't have dev/test and DR. If you can consolidate across clusters, that's news to me. I'm not sure it helps though, because it still doesn't scale over time.

The other problem is that it's VRAM allocation. Not PRAM usage. A big feature of 4.1 and then 5.x was memory overcommit and dedupe. So you can hit that 96GB VRAM limit before you hit 96 GB PRAM usage. That's huge for some people, not for others.

Your vRAM pool is all of the vRAM in a vCenter instance from a particular version of vSphere. So if you have 5 clusters managed by a single vCenter and three are running Ent+ and two are running Standard, your Ent+ pool contains all the vRAM from the 3 Ent+ clusters and your Standard pools contains all the vRAM from the Standard clusters.

Pools will also include licenses from linked vCenter instances (like a DR scenario).

Moving into the SDN space makes perfect sense for VMware, though it makes me wonder how it'll effect their relationship with Cisco. To me, the most important piece of this is that it makes two acquisitions in the last month that send a pretty strong signal that VMware is looking to seriously support third party hypervisors. If you have any doubt about that, take a look at Steve Herrod's blog post on the subject from earlier today:

Moving into the SDN space makes perfect sense for VMware, though it makes me wonder how it'll effect their relationship with Cisco. To me, the most important piece of this is that it makes two acquisitions in the last month that send a pretty strong signal that VMware is looking to seriously support third party hypervisors. If you have any doubt about that, take a look at Steve Herrod's blog post on the subject from earlier today:

And it still results in disgusting amounts of licensing money going to VMware. We're talking 10x the current costs in under 8 years.

It's not disgusting. You're paying for a service and product. It has a price set by the seller. Whether it's worth that amount of money to you (or your company) is not a decision you make once and carve in stone: it's something that should be re-evaluated regularly. Feature sets, licensing costs, maintenance costs and migration costs are all important part of that decision.

As for us, we're a VMWare shop but that's because, historically, Hyper-V simply didn't provide the functionality we needed and had requirements that simply didn't fit in our environment. That is still true for V2.0 of hyper-V (for us, at least). We're actively investigating V3 and it looks like that this version finally has enough features for us to consider it.

Unfortunately, it's still not clear that it's worth the cost (and trouble) of migrating our current infrastructure: we're a small company with 2 distinct production VM farms (completely separated). We do not have enough additional resource to perform a gradual migration so the cost involved in a switch to hyper-V would be comparatively very high. However, it's something we're seriously considering as part of our next infrastructure upgrade cycles.

As you get into larger enterprise configs with dedicated dev/test and DR sites you can really start to utilize the extra VRAM entitlement from underutilized gear.

Wait, what? You can only consolidate licensing across a cluster. If your dev/test, DR, and production is all in the same cluster, you don't have dev/test and DR. If you can consolidate across clusters, that's news to me. I'm not sure it helps though, because it still doesn't scale over time.

The other problem is that it's VRAM allocation. Not PRAM usage. A big feature of 4.1 and then 5.x was memory overcommit and dedupe. So you can hit that 96GB VRAM limit before you hit 96 GB PRAM usage. That's huge for some people, not for others.

Pooled across all hosts at the same license level on the same vcenter, or across all vcenters connected by linked mode. I have customers with a huge pools of available VRAM from clusters on multiple continents, as well as hot/warm DR sites, dev/test, etc.

As for costs increasing: one of their big marketing points is lower cost per workload than competing solutions, which I think is accurate in most (in my experience) cases when you factor in TCO across hardware, software, OPEX, etc. I think that when it gets to the point that VRAM entitlements make it more expensive for most people on a per-workload basis they will either increase entitlements or change the structure. Again, just my opinion. While recent moves have given the appearance to some that they don't care about pricing themselves out of the SMB market, I don't think that's the case and believe that something will change before anyone beyond fringe cases start to really run into issues with pricing.

It's not disgusting. You're paying for a service and product. It has a price set by the seller. Whether it's worth that amount of money to you (or your company) is not a decision you make once and carve in stone: it's something that should be re-evaluated regularly. Feature sets, licensing costs, maintenance costs and migration costs are all important part of that decision.

You may think that, but I can't imagine you would say that if you realize that licensing costs are now set up for exponential growth.

The current licensing model, in 10 years, is worth it to no one. It would become every IT group's largest expense.

We can assume they'll change it, but I can't build a long term strategy based on assumptions of a corporation gaining sanity, and so my strategy must be seek an alternate hypervisor before memory density increases make us unable to afford our current standard software.

You may think that, but I can't imagine you would say that if you realize that licensing costs are now set up for exponential growth.

Oh but I do realize that and I agree with you about how the licensing model works. I'm just saying that I'm not disgusted about it: all it does changes is the future cost calculations between VMWare and Hyper-V.

Now, please consider the situation of my company:- It's still cheaper and better today to virtualize than to return to physical (no matter what hypervisor we pick)- VMWare is still cheaper for us to operate tha Hyper-V because of the cost (in tools, time and system downtime) that a switch would imply.- VMware still offers us a more complete feature set.- We will not require additional licenses to switch between VMWare 4.1 and 5.0 (we're already running 5.0, actually, but we didn't need to buy additional license.- I have no idea what MS has in his book regarding virtualization licensing. There is nothing that tells me that, by the time we need to buy new VMware licenses due to increased memory pool, MS won't have changed their licensing model either. (This, in our case, is probably borderline: since we're running "starter" licenses, it means that ANY change in our licensing model will cost us a lot of money, at which point we'll have to reconsider the cost of switching. But we're not there yet).- If we were to setup a new farm by, say, next January or later, it's not unreasonable to assume the new farm would be running Hyper-V V3 + SMS 2012 (depending, of course, if MS can deliver on the promised feature set).

You see: it's all in the cost calculation. I'm not deluding myself by believing VMWare will do anything else than charge the maximum amount of money they think people will pay for their products. That's what capitalism is about. Right now, they think - for a number of reason - that their product is sufficiently far ahead of the competition for them to charge extra and, well, right now they are probably right (at least, we're paying them for the licenses and maintenance, not MS or Citrix). We do the same calculation in our end and, the moment the result changes, we'll switch.

You may think that, but I can't imagine you would say that if you realize that licensing costs are now set up for exponential growth.

Oh but I do realize that and I agree with you about how the licensing model works. I'm just saying that I'm not disgusted about it: all it does changes is the future cost calculations between VMWare and Hyper-V.

Now, please consider the situation of my company:- It's still cheaper and better today to virtualize than to return to physical (no matter what hypervisor we pick)- VMWare is still cheaper for us to operate tha Hyper-V because of the cost (in tools, time and system downtime) that a switch would imply.- VMware still offers us a more complete feature set.- We will not require additional licenses to switch between VMWare 4.1 and 5.0 (we're already running 5.0, actually, but we didn't need to buy additional license.- I have no idea what MS has in his book regarding virtualization licensing. There is nothing that tells me that, by the time we need to buy new VMware licenses due to increased memory pool, MS won't have changed their licensing model either. (This, in our case, is probably borderline: since we're running "starter" licenses, it means that ANY change in our licensing model will cost us a lot of money, at which point we'll have to reconsider the cost of switching. But we're not there yet).- If we were to setup a new farm by, say, next January or later, it's not unreasonable to assume the new farm would be running Hyper-V V3 + SMS 2012 (depending, of course, if MS can deliver on the promised feature set).

You see: it's all in the cost calculation. I'm not deluding myself by believing VMWare will do anything else than charge the maximum amount of money they think people will pay for their products. That's what capitalism is about. Right now, they think - for a number of reason - that their product is sufficiently far ahead of the competition for them to charge extra and, well, right now they are probably right (at least, we're paying them for the licenses and maintenance, not MS or Citrix). We do the same calculation in our end and, the moment the result changes, we'll switch.

There is a large disparity in the costing between using one of their starter packs, and using hundreds of hosts. When the numbers turn in to how many millions (or sadly 10's of millions if you stretch it out a few more years) it's going to cost to stick with VMware long term as opposed to how many tens of thousands, it changes the game quite a bit. The whole argument of "you get more for the same price if we don't change the model" forgets that application requirements aren't stagnant either. They're growing as well. Albiet slightly slower than availability, but not so slow that that argument holds much truth.

Is VMware better? Yes. Would VMware remain the standard for the forseeable future if we knew that they would revoke the silly licensing model, reduce the per license cost, or not set the per license allocation so absurdly low? Yes. Can we say VMware is our long term strategy with the looming exponential cost increase over time? No. I have to take a product that everyone loves to use, and is the best choice, and seek an alternative because the current projections place the licensing cost so far out of line with the value of the product in a few years that I have no choice.

There is a large disparity in the costing between using one of their starter packs, and using hundreds of hosts.

I don't deny that. In fact, I agree 100%. I only say that the fact that your providers will change their licensing model in a way that might not be at your advantage is part of doing business. As you point out in the rest of your message, it just change your own calculation and adds relative value to the competition.

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Can we say VMware is our long term strategy with the looming exponential cost increase over time? No. I have to take a product that everyone loves to use, and is the best choice, and seek an alternative because the current projections place the licensing cost so far out of line with the value of the product in a few years that I have no choice.

Looks like we're going to end up in the same place but for slightly different reasons: for you, sticking to VMWare might be too expensive today. For us, it's still cheaper to stick to it than to switch but, unless things don't follow their current trajectory, it won't stay that way forever or even for very long.

Meh. On the list of rules and lessons everyone should know one of the low numbered entries goes something like this:

"Whatever else it is about, it is always about money."

We do everything we can to control costs, but personally I am far more likely to wave Hyper-V in front of my VMWare reps nose during negotiations that I am to actually abandon ESX and run to Microsoft.

I mean, anyone who is thinking that MS is 'giving it away' for any reason other than to build market share and ultimately boost their own profits is crazy...and dangerous.

Meh. On the list of rules and lessons everyone should know one of the low numbered entries goes something like this:

"Whatever else it is about, it is always about money."

We do everything we can to control costs, but personally I am far more likely to wave Hyper-V in front of my VMWare reps nose during negotiations that I am to actually abandon ESX and run to Microsoft.

I mean, anyone who is thinking that MS is 'giving it away' for any reason other than to build market share and ultimately boost their own profits is crazy...and dangerous.

You'd best be prepared to actually pull the trigger on that switch - lest VMWare not actually budge.

I hope VMWare doesn't become the next Novell, where they have a superior product (well, had in the NT4.0/Netware 4.11 days) but price themselves into being simply a niche player.

You'd best be prepared to actually pull the trigger on that switch - lest VMWare not actually budge.

Why?

Are you thinking that there exists some scenario where VMWare will either raise their quoted prices because you are negotiating or actually decline to sell you product? There is no penalty for negotiating. Sure, there are times where one party won't beat the pricing provided by another, or even quite match it, but there are always concessions made.

The danger here is that management will, on occasion, make a decision that is sub-optimal from a technology standpoint for financial, or 'political' reasons. And yeah, that can suck.

But sales is sales, and competitive pricing is always available to the informed consumer.

The danger here is that management will, on occasion, make a decision that is sub-optimal from a technology standpoint for financial, or 'political' reasons. And yeah, that can suck.

In my experience, there is few purchase decisions that are purely based on technical standpoint. Finance and politics almost always have some bearing. It's logical, when you think about it: technology is usually only an aspect of the problem.

In my experience, there is few purchase decisions that are purely based on technical standpoint. Finance and politics almost always have some bearing. It's logical, when you think about it: technology is usually only an aspect of the problem.

That is absolutely true.

But as a technology 'architect' my goal is to see that I only present management with alternatives that are technologically reasonable. Because whatever 'they' decide I either have to live with it or move on...and I hate moving.

I'm generally happy if I can provide three proposed solutions that fall somewhere on the continum of cheap-and-reasonable to cool-toys-to-play-with.

Screening out bad solutions is probably more important than identifying the one most perfect option.

It's interesting to me that Citrix isn't even a part of this conversation.

Is XenServer a dead product?

I'd personally rank it after vSphere and Hyper-V, but I'm curious if it's moved from 3rd place to irrelevant.

I haven't played with the current version, but we started with 3.x and upgraded through 5.0 and a two to three node cluster of XenServer was more work and more failure prone than my three VMWare clusters with 15 hosts combined. Every time anything happened to the cluster, including upgrades, it inevitably meant a trip to the command line to muck with the cluster DB. VMWare has pretty much just worked and our lab Hyper-V 3 cluster hasn't presented too many problems thus far. In that regard it's irrelevant in my environment. The Oracle VM solution (also based on Xen) has likewise proven to be too fragile to consider for production use (one bug involved hitting restart in the GUI accidentally and hitting cancel to the "are you sure" dialog, this permanently broke that host until a management server reinstall could be performed).

XenServer definitely has a sweet spot in my heart and even if I forget Hyper-V's atrocious linux support history (it took 2 years for MS to even come up with something that works day in day out, through kernel upgrades etc, see broken DKMS feature in pre-CentOS/RHEL6) I still recall XenServer being more bullet-proof than Hyper-V; I liked it a lot when I ran a two-node cluster. The problem was that even features I consider basic ones in a cluster would've been $5k so when the moment arrived I switched to Hyper-V instead (we are pretty much a Windows shop w/ few linux servers and some iOS dev support.)I think Citrix should get rid of Advanced and blend it into the Free edition sans memory optimization, reporting and heterogenous pool support which should go into a new, lower-priced ($3k for two node, $2k for each additional node?) Enterprise tier, leaving the Platinum as it is except offering bundles (eg $8k for two nodes, $5k each additional node etc): http://www.citrix.com/English/ps2/produ ... ID=2300456

The Nicira and Dynamic Ops acquisitions plus Maritz going and Gelsinger coming in as CEO mean to me that VMware is taking non-Cloud markets far more seriously now. Most likely at least in part to compete against Hyper-V.

The Nicira and Dynamic Ops acquisitions plus Maritz going and Gelsinger coming in as CEO mean to me that VMware is taking non-Cloud markets far more seriously now. Most likely at least in part to compete against Hyper-V.

To do that they would need to come down a lot in pricing which I don't think will happen anytime soon...

The Nicira and Dynamic Ops acquisitions plus Maritz going and Gelsinger coming in as CEO mean to me that VMware is taking non-Cloud markets far more seriously now. Most likely at least in part to compete against Hyper-V.

To do that they would need to come down a lot in pricing which I don't think will happen anytime soon...

They could commoditize the hypervisor and try to get a lot more management tool wins. That's where the market is heading anyways so they might as well get in front of it. Ultimately the pricing model change for ESXi was made so as not to erode revenue, but I think they misunderstood just how much pushback they were going to get from the market (hell they admitted as much in the mea culpa letter with the revised entitlements). Fighting Moore's law only works if you have a product with few viable substitutes for deep pocketed customers (IBM and Oracle basically). VMWare is going to have to face reality and realize that they will need to fight like crazy to find new revenue because they're in a market segment where everyone else is giving away the razor to sell the blades.

The Nicira and Dynamic Ops acquisitions plus Maritz going and Gelsinger coming in as CEO mean to me that VMware is taking non-Cloud markets far more seriously now. Most likely at least in part to compete against Hyper-V.

To do that they would need to come down a lot in pricing which I don't think will happen anytime soon...

They could commoditize the hypervisor and try to get a lot more management tool wins. That's where the market is heading anyways so they might as well get in front of it. Ultimately the pricing model change for ESXi was made so as not to erode revenue, but I think they misunderstood just how much pushback they were going to get from the market (hell they admitted as much in the mea culpa letter with the revised entitlements). Fighting Moore's law only works if you have a product with few viable substitutes for deep pocketed customers (IBM and Oracle basically). VMWare is going to have to face reality and realize that they will need to fight like crazy to find new revenue because they're in a market segment where everyone else is giving away the razor to sell the blades.

And in their hyper-v competition, since so many of us already license our vmware clusters entirely for windows as well, it's not a huge stretch to just add on the SCVMM functionality, as long as hyper-v reaches that "good enough" level.

Basically, we'd be willing to go back to VMware 4.1 or even 3.5 functionality to avoid the cost. (assuming vcpu limits similar to vsphere, near performance parity, and similar rock solid stability).

Yeah, it's expensive. Probably too expensive. But you do get what you pay for. I can't imagine running anything besides VMWare in a production environment. In fact, I would almost say that unless you are prepared to pay for VMWare, you might want to think twice about virtualization. At least on any kind of large scale.

That said, I fully expect Hyper-V to eventually catch up, and be cheaper than VMWare, and work better for Windows guests. But that's a long way off, I think.

Currently most of our environment is on VMware 5. We're in the process of moving our Test/Dev and QA systems to RHEV (50/50 Windows/Linux guests). Assuming no reliability or scalability/performance issues we'll be moving our Linux guests to RHEV once we've gotten comfortable.

As we get rid of Windows guests the need for vCenter's automation is reduced & we'll probably use Hyper-V as our Window's boxes hypervisor. We already have Data Center licensing for all the hosts so this is a big win from a cost perspective.

Basically, we'd be willing to go back to VMware 4.1 or even 3.5 functionality to avoid the cost. (assuming vcpu limits similar to vsphere, near performance parity, and similar rock solid stability).

You have to realize you're in the minority with that. The real question is whether that minority is big enough to pressure VMware into relaxing or getting rid of the VRAM model.

One individual (you) does not create a consensus. I don't really feel that your claim is correct at all. The competition doesn't need to beat VMware because VMware is beating itself with its license model. The competetion just have to become "good enough".

Basically, we'd be willing to go back to VMware 4.1 or even 3.5 functionality to avoid the cost. (assuming vcpu limits similar to vsphere, near performance parity, and similar rock solid stability).

You have to realize you're in the minority with that. The real question is whether that minority is big enough to pressure VMware into relaxing or getting rid of the VRAM model.

One individual (you) does not create a consensus. I don't really feel that your claim is correct at all. The competition doesn't need to beat VMware because VMware is beating itself with its license model. The competetion just have to become "good enough".

competition is a good thing in our industry, it promotes a benefit for the end users, that said, Hyper-V isn't a major threat to VMwares dominance in the hypervisor realm. I meet with a lot of fortune 1000 clients and I've yet to see one running hyper-V as a tier 1 production workload hypervisor. It's not an "opinion" its simply a reality. Perhaps when hyper-v 3 comes out it will get higher adoption rates in some markets, perhaps shops will move over to it en masse, but until I see it happen the market is VMwares. Maturity in our business means a lot. Having hundreds if not thousands of companies that have sprung up around your platform supporting it is carries a lot of weight. CIOs and the people whose jobs depend on making decisions that would impact the business bottom line are fully willing and able to pay a premium for a product that works and are not keen on taking chances or putting their asses on the line. Sure there are companies that break this mold, but they are the exception and not the rule. In the non-profit and .edu space where the return of shareholder value doesn't exist, costs may be more sensitive, then again, there are significant cost breaks for those groups as well. Still, they do not represent the reality based community.

As for VMwares licensing model, I don't see it being the major deal breaker that many here seem to think it is. The cost of doing business is an expense that many companies won't haggle too hard over, especially if its something they have come to depend on daily, and trust me, MS isn't giving its shit away for free.

Until I see a like for like cost analysis of HyperV-3 vs vSphere5 my full judgement will remain skeptical about the cost savings of the MS product.

I think if they stick with the current vRAM entitlements and maybe even bump them up for the next release they'll be ok. The point where everyone will seriously have to consider bailing is if they move to a per VM license model (similar to how they currently license SRM, OpsManager).

My personal observation is way more customers think they are affected by vRAM licensing limitations than are actually affected. Keep in mind I am referring to current utilization rather than potential future utilization.

Things to keep in mind about vRAM licensing model:

vRAM entitlement is pooled across all hosts and licenses managed by a vCenter instance, not on a host by host basis.The amount of vRAM used is equal to 12 month rolling average of configured virtual machine memory of powered on VMs.To be compliant, the average must be lower than the vRAM entitlement.In any edition above Essentials Plus, there is no hard limit on the vRAM entitlement; if you go over, you get a warning.

With factors such as running an n+1 environment where you have sufficient failover capacity to tolerate host failures and the fact that most people don't run all hosts at 100% memory capacity, I've seen very, very few people actually run into the vRAM limit with current hardware. It certainly is possible, but there aren't many buying extra licenses over what they need for proc sockets to license hosts.

The takeaway: Just because you build a host with 2 sockets and 256GB of RAM does not mean you need to buy extra licenses. Analyze your actual configured VM memory as a sum across vCenter and see where you are at, even if on version 3.5 or 4.x and make a determination from there.

I think if they stick with the current vRAM entitlements and maybe even bump them up for the next release they'll be ok. The point where everyone will seriously have to consider bailing is if they move to a per VM license model (similar to how they currently license SRM, OpsManager).

Is there really that significant a difference, though? To my thinking, vRAM essentially is a per-VM model; you're being charged for the instances you spin up. The difference is mainly psychological.

I suspect you're right that they'll probably keep bumping the entitlements in subsequent versions to keep people from running away.

On the other hand, the people who are fretting about how much physical RAM next cycle's servers are going to have are missing the point. You're paying for the growth of your virtual environment, not the physical one. Don't want to quadruple your licensing costs? Don't quadruple the footprint of your VMs.

I think if they stick with the current vRAM entitlements and maybe even bump them up for the next release they'll be ok. The point where everyone will seriously have to consider bailing is if they move to a per VM license model (similar to how they currently license SRM, OpsManager).

Is there really that significant a difference, though? To my thinking, vRAM essentially is a per-VM model; you're being charged for the instances you spin up. The difference is mainly psychological.

I suspect you're right that they'll probably keep bumping the entitlements in subsequent versions to keep people from running away.

On the other hand, the people who are fretting about how much physical RAM next cycle's servers are going to have are missing the point. You're paying for the growth of your virtual environment, not the physical one. Don't want to quadruple your licensing costs? Don't quadruple the footprint of your VMs.

AKA don't take advantage of advances in technology because you've bought into a vendors licensing scheme. Thanks, but no thanks. I already have that problem with Oracle and core counts, having to hunt down suboptimal processors just to avoid large increases in licensing costs (for VM's that would be underspecing machines or not giving machines as much cushion as you could otherwise easily afford). Let's go back to paying per two socket box and let me figure out how much hardware I need to run my workload, thanks. If VMWare won't do it then MS certainly seems willing to accommodate me.

With 8, 12 and 16 core CPUs on the market, VMWare would see a sizable drop in revenue every time Intel or AMD up the core count in a socket. Doubling the work a single socket can do means a half the license sales going forward for them. Not nice for VMWare and if they start bleeding too much cash, not nice for the platform.

Maybe they should charge $X per socket and 10% or so in addition per core above 4 in each socket, or some-such. So, a 16 core socket would cost 120% more that a 4 core, but give you four times the available work. That would be interesting.

My personal observation is way more customers think they are affected by vRAM licensing limitations than are actually affected. Keep in mind I am referring to current utilization rather than potential future utilization.

I'd like to submit to you that one argument your company has heavily used over the years is that virtualization allow you to scale a lot better and cheaper so it's normal for your customers to be disappointed about future usage: you where the one who brought it up in the first place.